Production environments are becoming increasingly more hazardous to production personnel due to the increasing automation of manufacturing, for example, utilizing robots. Massive tools that move very quickly, and unpredictably to non-trained personnel not familiar with the production environment, are particularly dangerous. Industrial zone controls, such as lockout/tagout procedures are commonly used, but such controls create inefficiencies in production environments. For example, an entire assembly line may be shut-down at the instruction of a single individual that detects an unsafe situation; however the unsafe situation may be confined to only a small subpart of the assembly line or the production environment, thus there being no need to shut-down the entire assembly line. Light curtain systems are an example of a safety device that may be set up around a discrete work station, with the light curtain system being configured to automatically shut down a machine tool, for example, if a human or other object breaks a light plane defined by the light curtains. However, such systems cannot distinguish between personnel that are authorized to enter the work station and personnel that are not authorized to enter the work station.